An Island Princess Starts a Scandal Review

Updated on October 7, 2026

Verdict: A lush, beautifully researched Belle Époque romance between a Dominican painter and a ruthless duchess, with real heat and a warm sapphic community, held back by a romance that many readers feel runs on lust more than intimacy.

Best for: Readers who want a glamorous, politically aware historical with Latina heroines and explicit open-door scenes, and who will forgive a slow first half and a love story that is easier to feel in bed than out of it.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit open door)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 3.90 Goodreads average, a starred Kirkus review, and a consistent reader complaint about emotional depth)

Tropes: Opposites attract, ice queen and sunshine, a bargain that becomes an affair, forbidden love, secret relationship, older aristocratic heroine, found family, last summer of freedom, art and artists, Paris.

An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera is the second book of the Las Leonas trilogy and the only sapphic one, a traditionally published historical lesbian romance set at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where Manuela Caceres Galvan, a Dominican painter with one summer left before a loveless marriage, collides with Cora Kempf Bristol, Duchess of Sundridge, a businesswoman who wants Manuela’s land and has spent years refusing to want anything else.

It holds a 3.90 average across roughly 3,370 Goodreads ratings and nearly 790 reviews, it collected a starred review from Kirkus and a Washington Post best-romance-of-2023 pick, and its reader reviews land in a narrower band than that acclaim suggests: lots of four stars, a sizeable block of threes, almost no one who hated it. Why so many people liked it rather than loved it is the thing worth understanding before you start.

What Is An Island Princess Starts a Scandal About?

An Island Princess Starts a Scandal is a historical romance in the full Harlequin sense: Victorian-era Paris, the 1889 World’s Fair, money, titles and marriage markets, all written by an author who wants you to notice who usually gets left out of those stories. Here that means Caribbean and Latin American women moving through Parisian society, and a hidden network of women who love women living just below its surface. Goodreads readers shelve it as romance, historical romance and lesbian fiction, and romance.io’s crowd tags put “multicultural”, “Victorian” and “Latinx MC” near the top.

Manuela is the outsider who has decided to stop behaving: an artist with work in the Exposition, two best friends at her side, and six weeks before duty takes her home. Cora is the opposite in every way the genre likes — older, guarded, titled, and so committed to control that she treats her own feelings as a business risk. The book alternates between them, so you see Manuela’s appetite for life and Cora’s slow, reluctant thaw from both sides.

What Makes This Sapphic Historical Romance Work

The setting: The 1889 Exposition and the city around it are the most consistently praised element. Library Journal calls the book “superbly researched”, and even readers who gave it three stars single out the history as the part they loved.
Sapphic Paris as a community: Readers single out the secret salons and gatherings of women who love women, which give the book a forbidden-love tension without making it a tragedy. One reviewer simply wishes she could time-travel to one of those parties.
Representation with weight: Latina heroines in a Victorian romance are still rare, and readers repeatedly name that as the reason they picked it up. Kirkus describes the book as being as much about “finding one’s people” as finding one’s person.
The heat: romance.io rates it 4/5, “explicit open door”, and even the critical reviews praise the love scenes.
A standalone in a series: Books one and three of Las Leonas are male/female romances. This one stands on its own, and you do not need the others to follow it.

Book Synopsis

Manuela Caceres Galvan has come to Paris for the 1889 Exposition Universelle with her paintings, her two closest friends and a deadline. When the summer ends she is expected home to a marriage that will rescue her family’s fortunes and end whatever life she might have chosen for herself. Until then, she intends to take everything the city will give her.

Cora Kempf Bristol, Duchess of Sundridge, does not take things on impulse. She has built her reputation in business on being colder and faster than the men she competes with, and when she learns that the land she needs to outmanoeuvre her rivals belongs to a young Dominican painter, she assumes the purchase will be a formality. Manuela has other ideas. She has sworn never to sell — but she will trade, and what she wants in exchange is the duchess herself: a summer spent being shown the Paris that women like them keep hidden.

Cora agrees because it looks like a contained arrangement with a clear end date. It is not. The longer the summer runs, the harder it becomes for either woman to keep the bargain about land, and the more obvious it is that the life Manuela is going home to and the life Cora has built cannot survive what is happening between them. The question the book sets up is not whether they want each other. It is whether either of them is brave enough to choose something that would scandalise all of Paris.

My Review

The world is the triumph here, and I want to start with it because it is the thing nobody disputes. Herrera’s Paris is crowded, political and specific — the Exposition, the art world, the money, and the colonial assumptions running underneath all of it — and the sapphic underground she builds inside that city feels like a real place rather than a convenience. When readers praise this book, they praise the setting first, and they are right to.

The second pleasure is the opposites-attract engine. Manuela is bold, sensual and openly hungry for experience; Cora is starched, powerful and frightened of exactly that hunger. That is a dynamic the genre does well, and Herrera uses the dual POV to make both halves of it legible — you understand why Cora’s control matters to her, which makes the moments it slips land harder. The heat is part of how that works. The love scenes are frank, frequent once they begin, and doing real character work, which is why even unconvinced readers praise them.

Where it struggles is the romance outside the bedroom, and this is not a one-reader gripe. Among the most popular Goodreads reviews, the critical ones cluster on the same point: several independent readers say the attraction is instant and physical, and that they never saw enough of the two women simply getting to know each other to believe the love beyond the lust. One reviewer adds a structural reason — the bargain does not really start until around the halfway mark, and much of what follows happens off-page or at sedate gatherings Cora chooses specifically to keep things safe. Another found Cora’s refusal to admit her feelings went on too long. Around 24% of Goodreads ratings sit at three stars, and this is the reason those three-star readers give.

The expectation to reset is the cover. The title and the packaging promise a romp — a princess, a scandal, a duchess. What you get is a thoughtful, fairly slow historical with an essay’s worth of ideas about class, race, colonialism and queer survival in the nineteenth century, and a love story that takes its time to start. If you want a frothy rom-com in bustles, calibrate. If you want a historical that takes its heroines’ world seriously, you are in the right place.

My honest note: A richly imagined world and a hot, well-matched couple, with a love story that convinces in the bedroom more than in conversation. If you read historical romance for the history and the heat, this delivers both. If you need to watch two people fall in love scene by scene, you may finish it admiring the book more than feeling it.

Element	In An Island Princess Starts a Scandal
Central relationship	Manuela Caceres Galvan & Cora Kempf Bristol, Duchess of Sundridge — Dominican painter and guarded aristocratic businesswoman, opposites attract
Core tropes	Bargain-turned-affair, ice queen and sunshine, forbidden love, secret relationship, older heroine, found family
Setting	Paris during the 1889 Exposition Universelle, including its hidden sapphic social circles
Heat level	4/5 — explicit open door
Series	Las Leonas book 2 of 3 — reads as a standalone; books 1 and 3 are male/female romances
Content notes	Explicit sexual content, period homophobia and fear of exposure, an impending arranged marriage, family financial pressure, colonialism and racism as background themes

How Spicy Is An Island Princess Starts a Scandal?

A 4/5. romance.io rates the steam level “explicit open door” on the strength of 43 reader ratings, and Goodreads reviewers back it up from both directions — the fans call it “very hot” and “very steamy”, and even the three-star reviews praise the sex scenes. The scenes are on the page and they recur once Manuela and Cora stop pretending the bargain is only about land.

The thing to know in advance is the pacing of that heat. It is not front-loaded, and one reader who had come for a seduction plot found the bargain plot “way too chaste” for its premise. Nobody I found flags anything beyond consensual, character-driven explicit scenes. If you want the same level elsewhere in a historical setting, Ladies in Hating sits in the same 4/5 band, and Lady Jane’s Seduction is another high-heat historical.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read historical romance for a fully realised world, you want Latina heroines and a political edge to your period romance, you enjoy a buttoned-up older heroine falling apart for a free spirit, and you like explicit open-door scenes that carry character development.

You may want to skip it if: you need a romance built on long conversations and slow emotional intimacy, you have little patience for a first half that is mostly setup, you were expecting a light, comic romp from the title, or you prefer your historicals closed door.

In short: a gorgeous, serious, steamy historical whose love story is more felt than shown.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is not a BookTok discovery and it does not need to be. An Island Princess Starts a Scandal came out from Canary Street Press, a Harlequin imprint, on May 30, 2023, and arrived with the kind of trade support most sapphic romance never gets: a starred review from Kirkus, a positive notice in Library Journal, a review in the New York Times Book Review, an Entertainment Weekly best-of-spring pick and a Washington Post best romance of 2023. Its audience since then has grown steadily rather than virally, to roughly 3,370 Goodreads ratings at 3.90, 315 Amazon ratings at 4.2, and a smaller romance.io sample of 43 at 4.10. The rating spread is unusually compact: 26% five stars, 43% four stars, 24% three stars, and only about 5% at one or two. Very few people hate this book, and a quarter of its readers were left lukewarm.

The audiobook is a real part of the story. Harlequin Audio’s edition is narrated by Nneka Okoye and runs 12 hours 40 minutes, and listener reaction is mixed in an instructive way: one popular reviewer bumped her rating to five stars on an audio reread, saying the pacing worked better in her ears, while another found the audio hard to get into and only fell for the book after switching to paperback.

Prefer audio? Listen to An Island Princess Starts a Scandal on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The setting, first and most consistently — readers call it rich, deeply researched and immersive, and the Belle Époque detail gets named even in mixed reviews. Then the representation: queer Latina women in a Victorian romance is the reason many readers picked it up, and several say it delivered exactly that. The heat comes next, praised in plain terms by fans and critics alike. The yearning gets its own mentions — the fact that Manuela and Cora cannot be seen together in public gives the book a charge that fans describe as “top tier”. And notably, one reader says this worked better for her than book one precisely because of the long stretch of unresolved tension, which is the exact opposite of the main complaint.

What readers argue about and complain about: Emotional depth, above everything. Several independent reviewers say the relationship is built on instant physical attraction and that the book never shows them enough of the two women connecting outside of sex to make the love feel earned; “instalust” is the word that recurs. Pacing is the second theme: the bargain does not get going until roughly the halfway point, and at least one reader calls the first half nearly plotless. Third, a smaller note that the story beats echo book one too closely, and a lone but specific complaint that the heroines read as vehicles for the history rather than people. What nobody disputes is the research. The split is about whether the romance lives up to the world built around it.

The standalone question worth asking first: Yes, it stands alone. Las Leonas is a trilogy about three friends, but each book follows a different couple, and this is the only one with two heroines: A Caribbean Heiress in Paris (book one) and A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke (book three, published February 2025) are both male/female romances. The trilogy is complete. If you only read Herrera for sapphic romance, this is the book, and you lose nothing by skipping the others. If the friendship between the three women is what grabs you, the other two books are where it continues.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is An Island Princess Starts a Scandal a standalone?

Yes. It is book two of the Las Leonas trilogy, but each book follows a different couple, and this one can be read on its own. It is the only sapphic book in the series.

How spicy is An Island Princess Starts a Scandal?

A 4/5. romance.io rates it “explicit open door”, and readers describe multiple steamy, on-page scenes between Manuela and Cora once the bargain gets going.

Are the other Las Leonas books sapphic?

No. Book one, A Caribbean Heiress in Paris, and book three, A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke, are male/female romances. The three heroines are friends, so the books share a cast, but only book two is a lesbian romance.

When and where is it set?

Paris in the summer of 1889, during the Exposition Universelle. Manuela is in the city to show her paintings, and much of the book takes place in its art world and its hidden sapphic social circles.

Why do some readers rate it only three stars?

Mostly because of the romance’s emotional depth. Several reviewers say the attraction is instant and physical and that they never saw enough of the couple connecting outside the bedroom; at least one also finds the first half slow.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes. Harlequin Audio’s edition is narrated by Nneka Okoye and runs 12 hours 40 minutes. Listeners are split, with some saying the pacing works better on audio and others finding it harder to get into than the print book.

If You Loved An Island Princess Starts a Scandal, Read These Next

Goodreads’ “readers also enjoyed” list for this book puts Ladies in Hating first, and it swaps Paris for a Regency country house but keeps the heat level and the witty, mismatched heroines. If Cora’s chilly, titled reserve is the part you liked best, Courting the Countess builds a whole book around a cold countess thawing for a warm-hearted woman. And for the same period with a lighter, angrier comic touch, Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure is a Victorian revenge comedy starring two much older women.

For more like this, browse our guide to the best historical sapphic romance books, our list of sapphic books like Bridgerton, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

An Island Princess Starts a Scandal is an ambitious historical romance that does more than most of its genre. The 1889 Paris setting is superb, the sapphic community at its heart is warm and believable, and the open-door heat delivers what the premise promises. It is also slow to get its bargain moving, quieter than its title suggests, and built on a love story that many readers feel more in the bedroom than in the conversations between the two women. Whether that matters depends on what you read historicals for — but for anyone who wants Latina heroines, real history and real heat in one book, it is well worth the time. Check An Island Princess Starts a Scandal on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal ranks as a critically acclaimed, traditionally published sapphic historical — lavishly set and genuinely steamy, held back by a romance thinner than its world, and best approached for the history and the heat rather than a slow-burn emotional arc.